what does the cid come up as when calling a landline with name&number cid? just ‘wireless’ and number or somesuch like some cell phones, the billing name (like others–what we don’t want. we use a line as a business line), or can you customize the names that show up with the number?

I have no idea, tbh.

I went to try to test, but it turns out I don’t know ANYONE with a landline phone anymore, so uh, I can’t.

Yeah that’s basically the same conclusion I reached: it’s perfectly cromulent until you run into something you need that it won’t do, and then there’s absolutely no way to make it work, period.

A lot of the final decision was based primarily around the fact that I just was not invovled in what friends and family members were doing, because I had become a pain in the ass to contact and so people just… didn’t.

Mostly becasuse, well, I don’t like Android.

I’ve tried it repeatedly over quite a number of years, starting with the G1, and every time I’ve used it, my general opinion was ‘this is fine I guess, but I’d rather have an iOS device instead’. Excepting the two OnePlus devices: those were utter shit. One I was pretty sure was going to catch fire, and one that actually did catch fire. No more crap from them, seriously.

Will say the Nexus 9 tablet rates in the S-tier of all the tablets I’ve ever owned, though.

And I’m deep in the Apple ecosystem otherwise: Mac, iPad, Watch, AirPods and so on.

And, of course, I don’t think there’s a wearable smartwatch for android that integrates cellular stuff quite like the iPhone/Watch does in that it’ll share calls and messages on a single number. I know there’s a lot of stand-alone stuff, and a lot of non-cellular stuff, but the last time I looked there wasn’t really a seamless and cheap solution for leaving the phone at home and not losing any of the primary communication aspects of the phone.

I’m using their T-Mobile rebrand, and it’s just as good as T-Mobile ever was, excepting you don’t get any 5G access.

Though, tbh, I don’t care, since I’m paying $5 a month for 500 minutes, 500 texts, and 500mb of data. 5G would be a total waste since, I mean, even the 4G stuff can eat all my data allocation in like 30 seconds anyways.

I’m not sure where this “wants single-file variants” comes from.

I was having issues with pirated audiobooks stopping playback, being unable to resume playback, and losing playback status and location all the damn time, though this was a while ago.

The suggestion was to take these random audiobooks and condense them into one file, instead of the 15 tracks per disk, 20 disks per book mess they were, and sure enough that completely fixed the problem.

If it’s no longer an issue, cool, but for a while playback from books in lots and lots and lots of parts was flaky as fuck.

I still strongly dislike a lot of the dynamics around them.

They’re still privacy nightmares, they’re still running black-box software that’s not auditable and doing who the fuck knows what in the basebands, and they’re still covered in sensors running apps that are trying to scrape every byte of that data to profile you and sell that data to anyone who asks.

But, ultimately, I was spending too much time trying to stand on a principle that wasn’t really doing anything (I still use computers, and the websites of most of the apps I was using before, and still having a huge amount of data ingested since I didn’t live in a cabin in the woods) other than making my own life more complicated and causing shit like missing invites to things because my phone just didn’t get the SMS, or resorted the arrival order, or failed to download a MMS message or whatever whereas everyone on a modern phone was like, fine.

So I won’t say I’m all-in, or that I like them, or that I’ve even changed my mind that they’re little spy rectangles that are making us all stupid, but uh, too much in modern life is making the assumption you have one to completely unplug without losing an awful lot.

It’s just endless little things:

• How do you do TOTP 2fa on a dumb phone? You really can’t.
• I have to keep two copies of my media library, because the smart devices can play flac, and the dumb devices can’t
• I also have to keep two copies of my audiobook library: the smart devices play from audiobookshelf, which wants single-file variants, and the dumb devices need to be split into small chunks
• Zero access to any of the home automation stuff on the dumb devices
• Dumb phones are limited to SMS and MMS, and that dramatically impacts your integration with people on smart devices using iMessage or RCS, and you’re basically that guy with the shit that’s fucking everything up for everyone else
• Calendar sync? Nope.
• Contact sync? Also nope.
• E-mail? Good luck with that - if you’re expecting something important, carry your laptop.
• Wifi hotspot? Not on the phone I had, so nevermind about carrying your laptop, won’t do you any good.
• Voice mail? Sure, but good lord is ye olde dial-a-thing-and-hit-7-wait-no-8-damnit-i-mean-6 voicemail shit. Visual voicemail is 10000% less horrible

Edit: Also:

• T9 texting. I kinda got okay again at it but would not say it’s preferred anymore

And on and on and on. None of those are dealbreakers on their own, but it’s always something that either you can’t do, or can’t quite do right, or is actively a problem for everyone else you’re interacting with and you just… end up with so many little annoyances you’re not sure doing this makes any sense.

Hah was coming here to say basically this: if you’re always tired after sleeping, go get a sleep study. If you do have sleep apnea, absolutely nothing short of medical intervention will make a meaningful difference, and it’s an easy place to start.